Hello, and welcome to my blog on my theories of mind and matter. My name is Gibran Shah. This blog is an appendix to my main website found at http://www.mm-theory.com/, the theme of which is my own personal theory on the relation between mind and brain (or mind and matter). It is a theory that explains how it is that something physical like the brain, something that functions on the laws of physics (i.e. biology and chemistry) and computes information much like the electric signals inside a computer, create something so non-physical, non-law-abiding, non-computer-like as the mind - that is, as conscious awareness? How is it that this squishy, gooey, pulsating piece of living tissue can give rise to thoughts, to emotions, to seeing, to feeling pains and pleasures, to a sense of self identity, and to life in general? That's the question I aim to answer in my website, so if it interests you, go ahead and visit the site. The purpose of this blog, however, is to add supplementary thoughts to what is said in my website as they come to me over the years. I may also deviate from MM-Theory at times to go down other philosophical avenues, but the bulk of these blogs will pertain mainly to MM-Theory itself.
The first things I want to add to this blog are some answers to questions that I feel the website itself left lingering. I tried to be as complete as possible, but found that some ideas/problems just didn't fit in anywhere, so I'm going to devote the first few post of this blog to these ideas.
Some examples include the following:
* In my website, I have a paper called "Reality and Perception" where I resolve the major conflicts that a subjectivist theory like mine usually comes up against, one in particular being the problem of conflicting beliefs between two people both being correct. The resolution to this problem works insofar as the conflicting beliefs reside in two separate minds, but there are cases of a single individual who holds conflicting beliefs within his own mind without acknowledging or being aware of them. What to say about that?
* MM-Theory states that all physical systems as we perceive them are sensory representations of other non-human experiences being had by the Universal Mind. By default, we therefore assume that any specific instance of a physical system undergoing some activity represents a specific quality of experience undergoing a specific manner of change. As much as this may very well be, I want to propose a different formulation. I want to propose that physical systems and their activity represent, not so much a specific quality of experience, but only the manner in which they change. This would be akin to a mathematical formula representing, not so much the specific quantities that go into the variables of that formula, but the manner in which those quantities are calculated to yield the result; the quantities may be variable, but they are always calculated according to the same operations.
I will be using the famous "brain in a vat" thought experiment that philosophers are fond of. The idea would be that whereas a brain in a cranium will typically correspond to familiar human experiences like vision, emotion, thought, memory, hearing, language comprehension, etc., a brain in a vat connected to wires that simulate life as usual by stimulating the sensory regions with electric impulses might correspond to totally alien experiences that no human can even dream - despite the internal constitution and organic functionalities of the brain having changed not one iota. I'll explain this in full when I finally get to it.
* I want to propose that logic is not intrinsic to the nature of human thought - that is, it is not genetically "hardwired" into our brains - but learnt from our experiences with the world and how it works. In this way, I want to strengthen my argument about how the necessity I claim characterizes all experience spans beyond logic. What I want to propose is that we don't think logically until our illogical expectations of how the world should work get thwarted by that very world. In other words, our tendency to thereafter think logically is really based on contingencies - that is, the contingency of real world events and our experiencing them. This is similar to saying that a syllogism such as "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal" is no more necessary than the fact that all objects fall down - the world just so happens to work that way. This is not to say that the conclusion "Socrates is mortal" doesn't follow necessarily from the premises - of course it does - but that syllogisms in general should depict the way the world works is only true contingently. The necessity that characterizes syllogisms would be found in any other learnt thought pattern should our experiences of the world have turned out differently. If we could verify, by empirical experience, that all men are indeed mortal and that Socrates is indeed a man, but that somehow he isn't mortal, we would learn to think this way and this style of thought would indeed feel necessary. The necessity of our thoughts was felt even before we learnt to think logically, and would therefore continue to be felt any other way. To say, after being given the two premises above, that Socrates is immortal is rightly recognized as a logical fallacy, but not because of some intrinsic necessity that it doesn't hold; rather, because of the extrinsic necessity that if we experience the world that way then the thought patterns that match those experiences (i.e. syllogism) must hold. That we should experience the world that way, however, is contingent.
Naturally, I will have to shed a bit of light on how it is that two opposing conclusions from the same set of premises can both be true necessarily - that is, how one, who doesn't think logically, can conclude that Socrates is immortal, and how another, who does think logical, can conclude that Socrates is mortal. I touched on this briefly when I said, in the Advanced Theory, how some people's "logic" can flow by necessity based primarily on how those thoughts feel (i.e. there's a difference in "feel" between the thoughts of the logical thinker and the illogical thinker), but we can say more now that we understand the correspondence between experiences and the molecular structures of our neurons - which would indeed be different between the logical and illogical thinker.
There are other ideas I would like to add and this blog is where you'll find them.
Before I get to them, however, I'll give a few links to some philosophical discussions I got myself into on the forum http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/, which I frequent regularly.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=165134&start=0
This one has me discussing what constitutes life, and whether things like rocks or a comatose patient can be said to "live". The discussion digresses into me explaining the basics of MM-Theory and the concept of the self. I jump into the conversation near the middle of the first page.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=162783
Me and "Daybreak" discuss our very similar views on the nature of perception and reality, questioning whether psychedelic and marijuana induced perceptions of reality are "real". But we seem to differ on how we account for conflicts between contradictory beliefs held by different people.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=163306
I thought this one was interesting for its own sake. It doesn't have much to do with MM-Theory directly, but it does lean towards potentially proposing a mental technology (i.e. a cognitive program) that could foster more trust and trustworthiness in people.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=157550&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
Philosophy can be nasty sometimes. In this thread, one guy gets nasty with my opening question: What's more important? Truth or Health? - obviously relating to the position I take in my paper "Practical Applications".
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=157314
Here I lay out my argument about why the problem of free-will exists, which one can also find in my paper "Determinism and Free-Will.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=156812
I dared to argue that Nietzsche was an optimist in this thread. Again, has very little to do with MM-Theory, but what the hey.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=154539&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
Me and "nano-bug" share our pantheistic views. I enter in about a third of the way down page 2.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=150396
I try to "save" mind from the jaws of materialism and nihilism. Another one that gets nasty.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=149572
Questioning the reality of reality. This debate, in which "faust" and I argue over the meaning of "reality", gets very "heated" (but not nasty). This discussion has taught me a lot about how to argue my points with more care. I jump in near the middle of page 1.
Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com
